If I remember correctly the reason they did not expect the mission to last longer than that was because they expected the solar panels to get covered with dust and thus render them useless. I don't think they had banked on martial winds to regularly clean them.
Your recollection is correct. Consider too the dust accumulation predictions for the moon landing. It would appear that we (as humans) are not very good at dust estimates (dustimates?). This is reinforced by the continuing struggle/inability to manufacture dirt. As an avid composter with a ton (lol sorry) of experience, I can make you hummus for days. I can turn 90% of your organic household waste into growth medium, bokashi tea, or pre-dirt in anywhere from 6 months to 2 years. But if you want me to make dirt? I'll need a decade to get you a production level process that requires raw stocks, pre-processing, vermiculture, aquaculture, and many rounds of late stage funding. Dirt production stymies every modern industrial process because as it stands, you cannot reduce the time necessary for conversion from hummus to dirt. I find it beautifully tragic that terraforming Mars will require mass dirt transfer from earth (consider this tonnage conundrum and revel in the irony).
Don't take my word for it. Go out and try to make earth yourself. If you can reinvent this fundamental, elementary process, you will join Jonas Salk and Fritz Haber, and very few others, in changing The Game in a fundamental way.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy talks a lot about the "can't make dirt fast" problem, and I was surprised and impressed at how fascinating such a mundane-appearing problem could be. I had never thought about it before.
Note: I think you mean humus. Hummus is "a Levantine dip or spread made from cooked, mashed chickpeas... blended with tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and garlic."
You are correct. Incidentally, humus is a delightful compliment to a sound horticultural spread, not unlike it's etymological cousin. It can make things better, but it cannot be the main course.
Jumping on the opportunity to have somebody who knows about those things.
I used to have a huge garden, and made a compost by barely dumping anything organic on a big pile. It worksed great: low maintenance, never one problem, plenty of compost produced.
I now live in a flat, and have composter using worms.
I can't make it practical for the love of me.
If I put it inside, I get flies, no matter how much carbonated material I put in it.
So I put it outside, but it dies from either heat, or cold.
Even when I manage to avoid the worm genocide, the process is so slow. It does produce a fantastic liquid fertilizer in mass, but the volum of organic matter consummed is nowhere close to what I need. I eat a lot of vegies and fruits, and in 2 weeks, I have to put most of it in the trash can, waiting for the worms to work on the legacy pile of trash.
Definitely! First off, I am biased in my compost preferences and it is always good to hear different opinions. Second, what works for one fails for another, so no sense in throwing more effort into a process that isn't working.
On to your situation. In home composting is always tricky. My wife and I do indoor/outdoor because we have a yard. In your situation, I'd advise against vermicomposting for the same reasons you listed. I was the technical manager for an enterprise vermicompost startup. Our facility was a rowhouse basement and the owner of the property was a founder. Flies are unavoidable, as is the occasional vermischwitz. They are fragile guys and minor mistakes have major consequences. The exact ratios escape me, but 1lb of healthy, mature red wigglers can consume half a pound of Green (fresh) cellulose in a day or two. We were engineering soil additive, so we supplemented heavily with Gray (dead) cellulose (cardboard, paper, etc.) In an attempt to hit profitable output. I will spare you the further details of our failure. Suffice to say that vermiculture is tricky in the best circumstances.
My suggestion to you is twofold: use the Bokashi Method (https://www.planetnatural.com/composting-101/indoor-composti...) and find a friend with a garden to offload your Bokashi Tea. That link is one of the first hits on Google (read: not vetted) because if you go this route you are going to be reading a lot and there are many roads to Rome.
This is very short due to medium, but if you'd like to discuss in depth and at length I'd be more than happy to. Both composting and waste neutralization are passions of mine. Just let me know how to contact you should you desire.
In terms of exoplanetary interchange, time recedes and tonnage expands as the concern. Without a space elevator or MAC transfer solution, you'd be effectively FedExing teacups of dirt to a green house in a Sahara contained on Antarctica... on Mars.
It's also a matter of federal budgeting; when the rovers landed, NASA definitely did not have enough funds budgeted to keep tasking the rovers for 8,000 days. But as the rovers continued to operate, NASA requested more funds to continue, and Congress provided them.
Once a robotic mission accomplishes its primary objective, NASA has a great story to tell about marginal cost vs return of additional funds. It's not that uncommon; heck they still get funding to keep the Voyager program operating.
